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Notes -
The appeal of democracy makes a lot more sense when you think of it as civil-war-by-proxy rather than as a method for harnessing the "wisdom of crowds" to achieve some idea of good government. The whole reason we do politics in the first place is precisely because we don't agree on what a good outcome would be. We therefore try to create a system that roughly reflects what would happen if we did fight a war over every issue, without actually having to do so.
But a problem arises when reality marches on and the proxy doesn't catch up. Take for example the English Civil War: the actual power of the monarchy had already declined relative to that of the parliamentarians due to economic and military developments, but on paper the king still had all the powers of his medieval predecessors. Eventually, a few centuries of war and struggle reduced him to a mere figurehead.
In our own time we may see the emergence of a "technocratic ceremonial democracy" where appealing to popular sovereignty is as quaint and absurd as appealing to the Divine Right of Kings in the UK today.
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